Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Readers of the prestige press received a different view. Harrison Salisbury’s Behind the Lines: Hanoi, December 23, 1966–January 7, 1967 described a North Vietnam indifferent to submitting the United States to “Communist influence and control”—the country was just interested in defending their civilians from slaughter by American F-111s. The Village of Ben Suc, by a twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate named Jonathan Schell, described what it looked like when American personnel “pacified” a once-prosperous South Vietnamese hamlet: first it was bombed and shelled; then a joint U.S.–South Vietnamese army assault killed forty-one people on its first day; then, the traces were bulldozed, then bombed, its farmers transferred to a barren “strategic hamlet” behind barbed wire. (Time, in its negative review, savaged him for not pointing this out as an act of charity.) Schell quoted the reassurance of an American commander: “What does it matter? They’re all Vietnamese.”

This was something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence—the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.

TV cameras doted on the not-inconsiderable number of young women, yielding the weapon of sex. Some teasingly opened soldiers’ flies. Others placed flowers in the barrels of their guns. On the surface, a gesture of sweetness. Deeper down, for a soldier steeled for grim conflict, just doing his duty, the most unmanning thing imaginable: you are slaves, and we are free.

Hip and square lived in separate mental worlds.

“Get ready for a big event at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next August.”

(No one quite believed him. Since his 1959 inauguration, the oil heir was always drafting himself for president, then ostentatiously withdrawing himself from consideration, then drafting himself back in at the last minute.)

This is what Vietnam was doing to the Democratic Party: people who agreed about 98 percent of everything else were throwing schoolyard taunts at one another.

Here would be the New Politics’ tragic flaw: everywhere it recognized only enthusiasms. It couldn’t see, for instance, what Nixon did: that one wave of the political future was an ambivalent, reactionary rage.

(It sure made Nixon look respectable when he couched the same sentiments in four-syllable words.)

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

“We seem bent on saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it.”)

An AP photographer and an NBC camera crew captured a South Vietnamese police commander executing a man in civilian clothes with his hands tied behind his back. It was the kind of thing Reader’s Digest reported only the savage enemy did. The photo ran on the front page for breakfast-time perusal in even staunchly pro-war papers. In the New York Times it stretched across four columns, beneath a headline reading, “Johnson Pledges Never to ‘Yield.’”

CBS News’s Walter Cronkite, the “Most Trusted Man in America,” left his anchor desk and traveled to Saigon. He uttered an unprecedented editorial: “How could the Vietnamese Communists have mounted this offensive with such complete surprise?…After all, the cities were supposed to be secure…. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past…. It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

“It is not our policy to ‘have’ people.”

“Stubbornness and penicillin / hold the aged above me.”

He made his national reputation that year with a nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson that celebrated the pure-hearted nobility of Adlai’s defeats: “Do not turn away from this man…. Do not leave this man a prophet without honor in his own party!” It marked a certain structural weakness of liberalism: seeing honor as an end in itself.

In January, Eartha Kitt attended a White House luncheon on juvenile delinquency hosted by the first lady. “They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam,” the nightclub singer and Batman villainess said. It made Lady Bird Johnson cry.

Walter Cronkite’s broadcast detonated over the White House: “I’ve lost Mr. Middle America,” said a president who was now sallow and gaunt, terrified he’d be hit with another heart attack or a stroke, the kind that had crippled the second term of Woodrow Wilson.

General MacArthur was pictured on one puffing on his corncob pipe: “Anybody who commits the land power of the United States on the continent of Asia ought to have his head examined.”

Later, two polling experts, Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg, looked more closely at the data and learned that 60 percent of the McCarthy vote came from people who thought LBJ wasn’t escalating the Vietnam War fast enough. They weren’t voting for McCarthy because he was “liberal.” They pulled their lever for him, Scammon and Wattenberg convincingly argued in a book, The Real Majority, that came out two years later, because they were “Fed-up-niks.”

They saw McCarthy as an alternative to the status quo, and the status quo was a nation gone berserk.

Richard Nixon, as usual, understood the subterranean...

Like Churchill, like Abraham Lincoln—Nixon’s the man who came back.

This campaign, he promised, would be the most open he’d ever run. The press corps, charmed, composed an impromptu ditty around the bar about this New Nixon—“the newest ever seen.”

For actually, this was to be the most closed campaign he’d ever run.

The idea had come of an appearance the previous autumn on Mike Douglas’s afternoon chat show. As Nixon sat in the Douglas show’s makeup chair, he chatted perfunctorily with a young producer about how silly it was that it took gimmicks like going on daytime talk shows to get elected in America in 1968. The producer, a twenty-six-year-old named Roger Ailes, did not come back with the expected deferential chuckle. Instead he lectured him: if Nixon still thought talk shows were a gimmick, he’d never become president of the United States. Ailes then reeled off a litany of Nixon’s TV mistakes in 1960, when Ailes had been in high school—and, before he knew it, had been whisked to New York and invited to work for the man in charge of the media team, Frank Shakespeare. Shakespeare had been a division president at CBS. There had been talk of him as the fair-haired boy who might one day replace William S. Paley, the network’s president. A friend of William F. Buckley’s, what he really wanted to do was destroy liberals.

Genuinely impromptu encounters—the sort that were supposed to be the charm of New Hampshire campaigning—had a chance of turning nasty. Thus the innovation. They would film impromptu encounters. Only they would be staged.

Harry Treleaven was a TV-obsessed nerd who perennially bored people by rhapsodizing over the technical details of his craft. Militantly indifferent to ideology, his last triumph was rewiring the image of George Herbert Walker Bush, the new congressman from Houston who’d lost a Senate race as a Goldwater Republican in ’64. Men-on-the-street in Houston had thought George Bush likable, though “there was a haziness about exactly where he stood politically,” Treleaven wrote in a postmortem memo. Treleaven thought that was swell. “Most national issues today are so complicated, so difficult to understand,” he said, that they “bore the average voter.” Putting 85 percent of Bush’s budget into advertising, almost two-thirds of that into TV, he set to work inventing George Bush as a casual kind of guy who walked around with his coat slung over his shoulder (he was actually an aristocrat from Connecticut). Since the polls had him behind, Treleaven also made him a “fighting underdog,” “a man who’s working his heart out to win.” His ideology, whatever it was, wasn’t mentioned.

“When you want to win the hearts and minds of people, you don’t kill them and destroy their property. You don’t use bombers and tanks and napalm to save them.”

It was time to blame it all on the liberals.

The Hughes Commission noted “a pattern of police action for which there is no possible justification,” that “the single continuously lawless element operating in the community is the police force itself,” and that the ultimate cause of the violence was “official neglect.” They concluded, “The question is whether we should resort to illusion or finally come to grips with reality.”

The public was choosing illusion.

The feds later recorded Mayor Dunn taking money from a Mafia associate. Tony Imperiale had a long criminal record. The white public accepted these malefactors as tribunes of law and order nonetheless.

A new movie, Planet of the Apes, imagined what life would be like if whites suddenly found themselves a subject population.

America: she was starting to smell.

“This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal…. “The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. “What white Americans have never understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

as the lot of blacks improved somewhat, the marginal privilege of possessing white skin proportionately weakened.

It was a boon season for white expressions of grievance.

Garry Wills had written, alluding to the Kerner Commission, “many of those who have awakened to the concept of two countries are determined that their side must win in any conflict between the two.” On the radio nationwide, on March 7, the Thursday before New Hampshire went to the polls, Richard Nixon cast himself as the white side’s field marshal:

“Our first commitment as a nation in this time of crisis and questioning must be a commitment to order.”

Nixon wouldn’t put anything past any Democrat. “Of course they stole the election,” he apprised a new aide about 1960, “and Johnson will do anything to win the next one, too.”

The striking garbage workers were all Negro. Mayor Henry Loeb referred to them as “my Negroes.” He spoke pridefully of his city’s “plantation” race relations. During one of the garbagemen’s first marches, conservative black ministers, the kind who’d been scorning Martin Luther King ever since Montgomery in 1956, were among those teargassed. Now they were ready to fight, begging Dr. King to come.

“Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

“And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. “And I’ve looked over, and I have s-e-e-e-e-e-n the promised land. “And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know, tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land! So I’m happy tonight! I’m not worried about any-thing! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glor-y of the coming of the Lord.”

Indianapolis did not riot, and the legend of RFK as a pol with magic powers grew.

In Oakland, the patrolling of the Black Panthers saved the city from a riot.

Mourn, the Chicago Tribune was arguing, only because Martin Luther King had won.

two-thirds of Chicago cops called themselves racists.

The late L.A. police chief William Parker had called cops “the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.”

The president beseeched the House to bring the civil rights bill to a vote “at the earliest possible moment.” He signed the 1968 Civil Rights Act on April 11. The reason for its sudden passage was not entirely altruistic: in addition to its limited open-housing provision, it made conspiring to cause a riot a federal crime.